New Dallas dating app takes March Madness approach to romance

New Dallas dating app takes March Madness approach to romance

A new dating app has launched from Dallas, and its roots lie in professional sports leagues and college sports. Called Bracket Dating App, it's a tournament-based app whose stated goal is to put the fun back in mobile dating.

Is that a swipe against swiping? Yes. Bracket Dating App says you can say goodbye to mindless swiping, boring profiles, and impersonal conversations. Mindful swiping is still OK though.

Smithsonian says that the bracket phenomenon began in 1977 at a Staten Island bar, and is heavily associated with March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament. The other important use of brackets is in CultureMap's annual Tastemaker Awards, honoring the best in local food and drink, where they're used to help choose the Best New Restaurant of the year.

The Bracket Dating App program is newly launched, so its pool of users is still in build mode. But as designed, users will get one bracket every day, where they are matched with 15 other users, based on profile preferences and a rating scale. Head-to-head eliminations throughout the day lead to one winner, simultaneously unlocking a chat between both users.

Its profile preferences include age, gender, and location. To better narrow down their profile and likeability, users can answer Bracket-created questions, such as:

"If you were an ice cream flavor, what would you be and why?"

"If you were a part of a sitcom family, which would you choose and why?"

This would help if you never wanted to date someone who liked, say, The Big Bang Theory, which is just a horrid, awful show. Anyone who likes that show is not worth dating.

The ratings come from users who are prompted to review and rate other daters' profiles during each tournament bracket. The ratings start at good and get better. Females get ranked starting at Alluring all the way up to Goddess; males are ranked from Handsome to Mr. Right. No calling someone an Abomination to Humankind!

For $4.99 a month, users can have two brackets per day, with no time barriers and the opportunity to chat with the top two picks in each bracket.

Bracket was created by Whitney Linscott, a Dallas resident who left auto finance to bravely dive into the realm of entrepreneur. One of her requirements was that everyone always feel like a winner.

"Whether you've been chosen as a winner for another user's bracket, or you get a chat back from your own bracket winner of the day, it feels great knowing that impersonal, unconscious swiping was not involved," she says. She really dislikes that mindless swiping.

"The market is oversaturated with mediocre dating apps," she says. "And a lot of dating apps take themselves so seriously. I think there's a lot of millennials who want to meet people but are not ready for marriage. It's for people who want to meet people but the current dating apps aren't working for them."

Bracket is available for iOS users in the App Store. A launch party will be held in Dallas on July 21; by then, the app will surely be populated by at least 16 people so that the bracket fun can begin.